UK: Music royalties reach record high, songwriters "on minimum wage"

UK artists were paid £746 million in 2018 for their tracks being played, and that was record high - a rise of 4% on 2017. For the first time, PRS for music, which collects the royalties for artists, counted songs used on Facebook and Instagram Stories. But, as singer-songwriter Ruth-Anne Cunningham says to BBC, "a lot of songwriters are making less than minimum wage". PRS has 135,000 members, and somewhere around 25,000 out of them make a real living out of songwriting, because big numbers don't necessarily mean big money - if people see 10 million streams a songwriter might make £400 from that.